Our friends over at Hot House Marketing did a brilliant job designing our letterhead as part of our rebrand back in 2011. We decided to do a small run of pre-printed letterhead for the office.

To ensure the text in our documents didn’t interfere with the header, we created a template in Microsoft Word 2010 with a custom margin.

How Do I Create a Custom Margin in a MS Word 2010 Document?

1. Select “Page Layout” Tab.2. Navigate your mouse to the “Page Setup” Group and select the “Margins” button.3. Select “Custom Margins…” at the bottom of the “Margins” menu.4. The “Page Setup” menu will open. Ensure the “Margins” Tab is selected then adjust Top field from 1.0” to your desired size.

Whenever a client requested an electronic copy of a document, we would create it in Microsoft Word 2010 and then convert the .docx file to a PDF file to ensure the background image and text stayed in place. This method suited our purposes until a new project popped up that required a creative solution.

(Before Screenshot – unlocked Letterhead that doesn’t repeat)

The Sales Team wrote a list of questions in a Word document that they wanted sent out to a list of clients to gather information to create case studies. The client would insert their cursor into the text to type their responses after each question. Simple enough, except the Director of Communications insisted that the document have the branded letterhead appear on every page, regardless of how much text the client added to the document.

The other issue was that the letterhead image could not be locked in place so we ran the risk of annoying the client as they attempted to insert their cursor into the body of text and would instead select the picture. The solution was simple after it was discovered.

How Do I “Lock” a Letterhead Graphic in a MS Word 2010 Document (and have it reoccur with each new page created)?

Some of you may recall our May 2012 blog post: Word 2010 Mail Merge: Changing the Date Format about changing the date format of a mail merge field in Microsoft Word. This sparked a number of positive responses from our readers and raised more questions about mail merge. I thought I’d address a couple of these questions today.

Question #1

“If I want the day of the week included in the date – how do I do that?”

-Holly

Answer

This is a great question with a very simple solution – all you have to do is adjust the date format to include the day of the week. The date format can be adjusted to whatever you’d like it to be.

In the example I gave, the format was “MMMM d, yyyy”; as you might expect, the date would end up looking like “January 3, 2013”. If I wanted that to include the day of the week to look like “Thursday, January 3, 2013”, I would simply adjust the format in the merge field to “dddd, MMMM, d, yyyy”. With the field coding visible (see original blog post for instructions on how to do this), your merge field should appear as follows:

«Date»

Your date format should change from this:

To this:

Thanks for the question, Holly!

Question #2

David Rubin of BMO Nesbitt Burns Financial Services Inc. came up with another excellent question:

“What would be the entries for $000,000 and 0.00%? I can get the date to work, but am having trouble with the numeric [formatting].”

In other words, how do I set up a mail merge in Word to work with Excel data that has numeric formatting such as dollar amounts or percentages?

Answer

There are a few ways to accomplish this.

One way is to use the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE). It is nowhere near as complicated as it may sound. After testing this out, I’ve found that this works best overall, particularly if you’re merging from a spreadsheet that already exists and contains a lot of numbers. I’ve outlined the steps for this approach below*:

*Please note:

These steps are for Word 2007/2010. If you are using an earlier version, please send us an email; we will be happy to send you the appropriate instructions for your version.

These steps are written under the assumption that you already know how mail merges works and how to perform one. If you need assistance with this, please let us knowand someone can walk you through the process.

1. If it already exists, open your mail merge document. Otherwise, you can simply open a blank document.

2. Go into the Options dialogue box. If using 2007, this will be behind the Office button. In 2010, it’s under the File tab.

3. On the Advanced tab, scroll down to the General section (almost at the bottom):

4. Check the box next to “Confirm file format conversion on open” and then click OK.

5. Begin your mail merge; you can do this through the Mail Merge wizard, but I prefer to skip that and go straight to Select Recipients. Whichever way you choose to get there, once you’ve selected your data source you will see the Confirm Data Source dialogue box.

7. In the Microsoft Excel dialogue box, under Named or cell range, select the data range or worksheet that contains that data you wish to use:

8. Now preview your results – all of your numeric values should appear as they were formatted in Excel!

Another method is to work with the field codes directly in Word; this is what we did when we changed the date format. This really only works well when the Excel worksheet from which you’re merging only has one or two number columns. The third way, and probably least effective, is to format the Excel worksheet cells as text. This really only works well if you’re creating a new worksheet directly from the mail merge and if you’re not performing any calculations in the worksheet.

Thank you, David, for another great question!

We’d love to hear from you! If you have any tips or tricks related to any Microsoft Office program, please feel free to send us an email.

For example, the other day our Client Service Coordinator, Katie Caplan emailed our CEO Gerry Brimacombe a contract that was scanned as individual jpeg files. Gerry wanted the individual pages combined into one PDF and decided to record a short How-To video for Katie.

This video will be saved in our SharePoint portal Procedure wiki along with written step-by-step instructions (below) to ensure this super quick tip is available to all other staff.

“​Here’s how we would put those images into a Word file. You can have them wherever, here they are in an email. And I’ve got a Word document down here, so there’s a blank Word document. So back to the email – so I can just take those images and I can drag them (hover over Word until it pops up) and then drop them into a Word document. Actually, I’m going to set the margins really narrow first because it automatically sizes the images when they go in there.(Probably should set it at zero margins) And from there you can save it as a PDF.” – Gerry Brimacombe

Note: Be sure to name your files numerically to ensure they are dropped into the Word file in the correct order .

For example, in the video the files are named as follows: Image.jpg, Image(2).jpg, Image(3).jpg, Image(4).jpg

How to Save a PDF in Microsoft Word 2010:

1. Click the File Tab.
2. Select Save As button.
3. Use the drop down menu beside the “Save as type:” to change the type of file from “Word Document” to “PDF”.
4. Click the “Save” button.

Ever wonder how to change the date format of a mail merge field in Word 2010?

Although some might expect the answer to be as simple as changing the format in the originating document, I quickly discovered that is not the case. After spending some considerable time trying to figure this out on my own, once again Google came to the rescue!

Thanks to Paul Edstein (a.k.a. “macropod”) of Microsoft.com and his easy-to-follow steps, I was able to accomplish this task in less than 5 minutes!

Here’s how you do it:

1. Select the merge field you want to change. In this case, it’s the Date field:

2. First, you need to make the field coding visible. To do this, press Shift-F9. The field you selected should now look like this:

3. In the screenshot above, the word “Date” is the merge field’s name. If you see any text after your merge field’s name, delete it now.

4. You’re now ready to change the format. Add a space after your merge field’s name and type the following: \@ “MMMM d, yyyy” Your merge field should now look like this:

Keep in mind that you can change the date format to whatever you like. Other possible formats could be: • dd/MMM/yyyy • d/MMM/yy • d MMMM yyyy

The only thing to remember is that you need to use uppercase M’s to indicate months because lowercase m’s represent minutes.

5. When I was done, my date format went from this:

to this:

We’d love to hear from you! If you’ve got any tips or tricks relating to any Microsoft Office program, please feel free to send them on over to info@sectorlearning.com.

Presenting information in a document can be challenging enough, let alone making it appear polished and professional. Before I knew that this button existed, I would spend far too much time manually adjusting each individual column or row width to have them appear even.

Select the whole table.Two new Table Tools tabs (Design and Layout) will appear in the Ribbon when the table is selected.

Select the Layout tab.

In the Cell Size group, you will see an icon for “Distribute Columns” below an icon for “Distribute Rows.”